The difference is that San Francisco isn’t under the civil and administrative control of a terrorist government, so if four hostages (say, from LA) were taken into an apartment building in San Francisco, then the authorities in San Francisco would be called, and they would deal with the situation.
If San Francisco’s civil and administrative government was run by a terrorist group that did the kidnapping in the first place, and the only way to get to the apartment was to engage in pitched battle against the SFPD through the streets of San Francisco, then yeah I would absolutely expect hundreds of casualties. You’d need to be braindead levels of stupid not to.
…but those authorities that got called into deal with that situation also had hostages of their own. In fact, they had thousands more hostages than what the terrorist organization had. And they regularly beat them, humiliate them, and torture them, many under the pretence of “administrative detention.”
And those authorities in San Francisco would also have been bombing the hell out of the neighbourhood for eight months, have complete air, sea and land superiority, had destroyed the healthcare system of the terrorists, and forced over a million people out of their homes before damaging or destroying those homes. Those authorities have complete control over the borders, including who and what gets in and out. And they’ve had the civilians living in the proximity of those apartment blocks under siege for eight months, and many of those civilians are experiencing famine.
Those terrorists did some pretty bad, evil things. They should be captured and punished. But the authorities? We don’t get to call them terrorists. But they are some evil motherfuckers. And they will never, ever be found accountable for their warcrimes.
Yeah, but one would question why it got to this point anyway, when the option of diplomacy has been on the table the entire time.
And you would have to question why they would bomb a market. I can show you the video of the immediate aftermath if you like. Because those mangled bodies weren’t caused by a “pitched battle.”
Eight months.
Over 40,000 Gazans dead.
Over a million people displaced, and continued to be displaced.
Only 7 rescued hostages.
How fucking useless are the IDF?
Eyewitness accounts on the ground. It’s been denied by Israel, hence the “apparent”, there hasn’t been independent confirmation, and given the nature of this “war”, we are unlikely to get it.
…considering Israel’s track record with the truth, it would normally mean the complete opposite. Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the IDF routinely lie all the time.
Both sides have lied routinely. But it seems no one has denied, “they posed as Palestinian refugees from elsewhere, to infiltrate the camp”, so that’s probably true.
It would seem to me, and I definitely could be wrong here, that certain people in here value their heritage more than they value being decent human being, and/or they are just too biased to be objective.
Who? IIRC, Smapti is not Jewish. And blaming someone’s Jewishness for any bad views is at least a tad anti-semitic. Smapti’s ethnic or religious background is irrelevant to his dumb views on this conflict.
For the record, I have Jewish cousins but am not ethnically Jewish myself. I am passionate about Israel because it is a liberal democracy under assault by fascist theocrats who want to commit genocide against its people and who are experts at exploiting liberal guilt to get the naive and squeamish on their side.
Israel at present is led by fascists who have functionally been doing Hamas’s bidding for years and are continuing to do so. The more Gazan civilians killed by the IDF, the stronger Hamas and other fundamentalists get. Right now, the Israeli government and the IDF are essentially working with Hamas to destroy any chance at peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians in the long term, because that’s what they (this Israeli government and Hamas) agree on - no peace, no security, and absolutely no two state solution.
It occurred to me that @Smapti’s theory leads to this result. If Israel isn’t responsible for the tens of thousands of civilians that they’ve killed–if all those deaths are Hamas’s responsibility–then it follows that Israel is the means through which Hamas is accomplishing the deaths. Israel’s government is, according to his theory, a helpless tool in the hands of Hamas, or at best a useful idiot dancing to their tune.
Idiots with no clue about how customary IHL works shouldn’t try and use it to prop up barbarity when way smarter people than them covered that loophole ages ago.
Clearly, if you think “they didn’t sign” has been any kind of excuse for a while now. That ship sailed in 1993.
Like I told that dumb motherfucker Smapti, the international community aren’t the gullible idiots he would like them to be, and addressed this “but we didn’t sign” excuse decades ago.
Sure, and by opening this box I agree to abide by the EULA therein. The ICRC can fuck off if it thinks it can give orders to sovereign states regardless of whether they accede to them or not.